Damn.. now I have to get involved.. damn you all!
I have to defend Shawn here, not because he's a friend, but because you have to see it from HIS perspective.
If you were the owner of a company that was paying say $5 a lead, and you got 10,000 leads from an incentive campaign, only to find out that of the 10k leads ($50k spend) almost all of them were fraud because some kid was doing it to pay for his college tuition, wouldn't you be pissed the hell off and feel cheated? I know I would have gone way farther than Shawn did. I would have not only gotten him tossed from school, but I would have gone after him financially, and done lots of super fucked up things right back to him, especially if the kid had the nerve to threaten me by trying to be a tough guy on his computer. But that's just me.
A lot of people would just handle this in a manner where they just cancel the kid and not pay him, and close the account to be done with it. Shawn taught him a valuable life lesson here.. if you are going to try to screw someone, you must take into account that there is a very good chance you yourself will be screwed back, tenfold. That's the game we play, and the risks people need to realize when they do shady or gray hat style marketing.
When I was an email spammer back in the 90's, we always knew the risks of our campaigns. We knew that there was a good chance we would spend money to make some, and that we could lose all of it if we were caught spamming. Although we were rarely caught doing it, it would happen every now and then, and we'd lose out on five to low six figures sometimes. But instead of bitching about it, we accepted it. And we were damn lucky we didn't have someone like Shawn as the affiliate manager in charge, because then we'd all be screwed just a bit more.
Overall, you can't blame Shawn for this stuff. Yes, he got a kid kicked out of college. Big woop. The kid deserved it. But I look at it from two different perspectives..
1- From a Gray hat perspective - He got what he deserved because he was too cocky and didn't cover his tracks correctly to get away with it. Which means he either didn't know what he was doing, and didn't take the precautions he should have, or he was just an idiot and thought he could game the system without weighing out the consequences. So yes, it was justified and he deserved it. The more newbies that get caught and knocked off, the better it is for the big boys who know what they are doing.
2- From an AM perspective - He cheated, he needs to get cancelled and all funds revoked BECAUSE it was premeditated. It's not like he did something and got a few bad leads, or did something and caught shit for it but didn't know about it. He knew full well what he was doing and looked at it from a "I'm going to game the system" perspective. Instead of just taking the loss, which he should have, because he got caught, he went on to threaten Shawn and tried picking a fight.
Overall, I don't care how you put it, the kid tried fucking someone and got fucked right back. That's the game we play guys, you should always remember that and take that into consideration. If you're going to be shady, expect a chance of getting fucked right back. There are plenty of precautions to take to avoid it, but in the end, you're always going to have that risk, because going this route means you are thinking outside the box, but at the same time your risk factor skyrockets.
It's kinda sick how he went after the college kid personally, and it's a douchebag move to post BYA's WhoIS as a link, but I think it's easy to see why Shawn did what he did. Somehow though, I have the feeling Shawn wouldn't have a problem justifying this either: